Reading at Bard Hall, 22 November 2013

section 83 of Fire Exit

Carve silence, churl, carve

absence into aroma

you don’t miss their faces you miss their sheen

ælfscin or aura, the light around one

that makes her who or him she is,

elf-shine the preter-human shown,

faërie folk are what we must become,

elves are not some belated ancient lingerers

they are our future selves

keen wise dangerous and rife with pleasures

we catch a glimpse of them sometimes

when the moon or noon be right

and the shadow falls

they are we will be

and till then be quiet, read your tree.

20 September 2013

As soon as it comes home
it will be me
again or for the first time
who can decide
out here where the trees
publish so many
variations on the same news
the way we music.

from RK's Traubenritter Maxims

This gentle clack of billiard balls on the green felt behind me makes me think of the endless rolling and occasional collisions of asteroids, spread out along the ecliptic mostly, or rogues in free space tumbling along rebel orbits of their own. We pass unscathed through their geometries. Or do we? Do those bodies too (as the ancients surmised about the canonical planets) cast influences our way, subtle shifts of love and aversion and indifference, so that by them also our moods (those vagrant beasts who live our lives for us) are shaped?

BOOK

The opera of the faraway

like a Victorian children’s book

I hear voices inside the word

of old adventurers, their lions,

glaciers, killer whales,

the green of Shalimar

blood-spattered as with roses,

the opera of all we never knew

here in our trembling hands.

Robert Kelly reads at T/Space, the art space of architect Steven Holl, in Rhinebeck NY, 7 September 2013

Robert Kelly reads at T Space

HYMN TO ZEUS

The flirtations of Zeus

have no boundary.

Lightning runs down the solitary tree,

fire loves the wood of it

we think, but in truth

fire loves this secret water

deep inside each thing.

The water hidden

in the crystals of steel,

water in the wood, sap rising

to meet Jupiter rushing down

to the water in us.

II.

That is Zeus.

Makes girls and boys out of everything

his power makes us who we are

as once on Helicon

he seemed to take a fancy

to a chubby little shepherd

ripe on the altar of puberty and

rushed down from heaven

to plant one scorching kiss on those rude lips

so ever after that young swain made

song whenever he tried to speak

so his plainest hello could

thrill the hearts of all the shepherdesses,

Genesis of poetry.                   

III.

“the swan was before we were married”

says Jove to Juno in Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers

history changes day by day —

no one knows what comes before

because feeling is always and only right now

and history has no heart to feel.

The Swan also is tomorrow.

IV.

Was there even time to answer them

before the air came down

— who made the air? —

to lock our snug atmosphere around us

safe so we could breathe?

But we weren’t we yet,

we had to get born from crystals of air

— why a man has a chip of ice

deep in his every heart —

and learned to wrap a silk of skin

around a mass of air.

A net of blood to carry it.

It’s a guess

to call our father’s name.

Zeus gave us the weather,

ta metarsia

so let us praise Zeus.

Dia. Accusative case of God. 

It’s time for me to start

reading every book again.

For him if not for me.

V.

Me, I look out the window

I see the air.

What can be wrong with me

that I can see the air?

The outside calls

to the inside,

air inside me too

solemn as Tennyson

blood-journeying oxygen,

caravaning its way through the frail brain.

My hungry eyes, my hungry eyes.

VI.

Hymn to Zeus.

He sees us when he looks down

when we do something

worth his notice,

some offering or some public iniquity—

the beauty of Zeus is this:

he does not know what we’re thinking.

And all the forms Zeus takes

rejuvenate the human race —

the swan of our grace, the gold

in the mercy of our eyes,

our eagle wit — he pours

the beast-god stuff in,

our genome rises to adore.

[28 July 2013]

Build a bridge under water

the beauty of its structure

— stone, wood, I. K. Brunel’s red iron —

improves the sea.

2.

For we were brought here to define

give name and shapes to natural things

and teach them manners.

3.

Or we were born for this

from seafoam and crucifixion

to work out of pain

a frail beauty

that teaches somewhere else

a beauty lasts. 

[26 July 2013]

Try to tell the weather

what to do. 

Use ancient difficult words

it might remember

from when it was young

and played with Zoroaster

on Europe’s highest mountain

or do I need

a darker

animal than that?

[24 July 2013]

Hide me from myself

where No One finds me

your drunken daughter

your god-crazed son

then I will learn

how to answer the rain

in its own language

give lessons to the rose.  

Till then I’m just in the way

of everything I really mean.

[23 July 2013]

If you open a word

who knows what you might see

Cagliostro’s fatidic circle

a language made of bees

green shelf ice off Labrador once

every word a dream

open the door it is and dream it.

Section 312 of a work in progress

312.

A poem is guided meditation

mild propulsion of the written world

when it stops the process it launched sails on

knowing the mind

clear light between the names of things

between the things

so.ma the bright between

the new the fresh the uncontrived

your mind finds by itself

sacred absence in the core of you

all the holiness and shadows pass

maidens and heroes and sunlight on the sea.

(A recent section from a work in progress)

191.

He will be safer as a ferly-man if men they have or are

he will be a leper-man in ordinary land

his voice the bell to warn away the fearful

because language is a holy terror believe me

hide yourself in the silence of story

there’s always something left to believe

dust for sparrows said the old aesthete

be bathed clean in what defiles us

Arbeit, heilende Welle in what defines us

how far inland we’ve been carried by the wave

left where no other wave can come

lost among friends in a house of one’s own. 

ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10

                                                            for Betty

On a scale of 1 to 10

the rain falls wet

Lenin's mummy outlasts glasnost.

The kingdom of cicadas rises and falls,

on a scale of 1 to 10

our caves are brighter now and less dank

diner coffee keeps getting better

waitresses get older and blonder

and I don't know for sure where all this goes

Nero Wolfe would call it amphigory, 

nonsense verse, nonsense with numbers,

on a scale of 1 to 10

I've hardly begun

the muddy Orinoco impregnates the sea,

the Homestead Act is far away

but the prairies are still there

people I knew got acres in Alaska

even in the 1950s -- ah, 

there's a number at last, or four of them,

all of them but one on a scale of 1 to 10

and that one was none

so on a scale of 1 to 10

the world has not even yet begun

and all the pizza parlors and battleships

are just illusions and I'm beginning

(speaking of beginnings)

to wonder about me, 

on a scale of 1 to 10 am I here yet, 

is there anyone behind this noise you hear,

people buzzing about the cicadas, poor things,

they don't even exist on a scale of 1 to 10,

only André Breton has got their number, 

Arcane 17 from long ago Gaspé, and Canada,

what is Canada on a scale of 1 to 10,

and shall I count the ways,

let alone Massachusetts?

On a scale of 1 to 10

pain for instance is usually at zero or eleven

but pleasure measures 

itself meekly, how rarely joys

or even blisses

get past 8 or 9, 

and from what we read in the Bible

heaven doesn't even get to 7,

all those feathers, all that 

stone-age music on tin harps.

But where was I on a scale of 1 to 10,

was I a pirate was I a priest,

all nouns are 10 all verbs are maybe

depending on who's looking, 

on who's talking, 

and who is listening?

On a scale of 1 to 10

is it you or is it him,

the man in the moon, the woman in the wind

or is it window, on a scale

of 1 to 10 is it even now yet, 

this bright day I'm trying to believe

all the numbers scattered round my feet,

birds chasing beetles, shadows chasing sun,

on a scale of 1 to 10

am I even me?  

TRAGACANTH

                    Maybe. 

Or gum from the peach tree

in the Hungarian back yard —

how many years.

I had an alchemical

laboratory in the cellar

and didn’t know it. 

I thought it was all logwood,

spirit lamp, daydreams, silverfish,

window screen, dust, dark weeds outside,

the peach tree wrapped in burlap, sulfur,

test tube, book. 

But it was alchemy. 

My parents told me so

by leaving me and it alone.

                                                            3 June 2013

Sunday on Cuttyhunk, cold bright wind from the sea, big waves rolling in.  We're happy to be here.

When the violin climbs the stairs

and the cello dithers down below

we know an assignation’s forward,

a pretty girl up there

with her arms full of violets.  

AMONG THE BASSOON

                                                            for David Adam Nagy

Flügel, grand piano

piano with a wing

uplifted,

             shadow of the raised top

on the conservatory wall—

gnomon of the sundial

cast by the low-slung light

dramatic lighting

                              and the bassoon.

2.

Bach first.  Prelude

to everything

else,

          he

is our B.C., the primal one,

the tone

             cast on all time to come

the shadow

of the bassoon rises and falls.

This instrument

always sounds wrong,

comes from outside music

from a land of being,

of suffering and running away

and coming home,

                              wrong

by its nature, the way nature

is wrong too,

                    as if a beast had to die

in pain to breathe such sounds,

but that’s only natural,

nature’s like that,

                              sings

truest as it goes.

Goes away.

                    Shadows

dimming into the dark.

Cherry blossoms

falling in the prime.

3.

Or on our little island

there is a single solitary tree

in the graveyard,

                              a paulownia

or princess tree,

its flowers come before the leaves

and when those fragrant purple blossoms fall

they leave seed capsules behind,

pointed ovals,

                    hollow, cracking open, hard,

hollow as wood, hollow as the sound of the bassoon.

4.

He transposes what Beethoven

heard (or wanted to hear)

on the cello for the bassoon.

A rounded box with strings

becomes a man with breath

pouting into a hollow tube

though quivering reeds.

American day aj, day of the reed,

tube, rushes, human spine

up which all the messages pass

or sing, trying to reach the mother brain

so far below the music.

5.

Seize the moment

the music doesn’t last,

the pretty girl is pretty

for a minute

then the tide comes in

goes out again and the house

is empty, sea-birds

noisy on the cliffs,

if you’re lucky there’s

still a wind for you to hear.

6.

The look on our faces

is to be heard.

Listeners are performers too.

Eyes open in the light

receiving light, the ears

too are ridden by some

sorrow that comes before

anything we ever knew

to make us sad,

                                        a requiem

built into the nature of the world,

a mortal sorrow

before anyone ever died,

like that village

the Buddha sent the mother to

to find her dead child.

7.

All the bodies with their breaths and fingers

all together now understanding out loud,

make us be the animal we pretend to be,

human love human fear human history

and we are really nothing at all but

bright joyous spirit playing brief on a field of ash

                                                                      13 April 2013

Charlotte in the great Sycamore at Vassar

for in a dream said the rebbe We

always have a minyan

all the girls of us are men

and all the two of us are ten

                                                       (from Minyan)

Poetry is easy. 

It is an imitation

of what does not exist

circuit diagram of a new self

you suddenly briefly have to be

and suddenly you are legs and light and

nothing but dance

and nothing dances but you.

                                                  20 April 2013